What set their hearts a-burning was not the mere word of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was the Christ who was behind the word. It was their immediate contact with that personality, and the mysterious outflow of His life upon them, that stirred them as only personality can do, and moved their nature to its very depths.
^ When the essayist Hazlitt was a young man at home, his mind was dull and his faculties unawakened. But in one of those charming essays that he calls " Wintersloe," he narrates how the poet Coleridge came to see his father, and young Hazlitt walked several miles home with him. Hazlitt tells, in his own eager and eloquent way, all that the walk with Coleridge meant for him. It quickened his intellect, gave him a new world, put a new radiance into the sunset for him, and a new note into the song of every bird. His heart began to burn, and it was not the talk that did it ; it was the poet who was behind the talk.^
Hath not thy heart within thee burned
At evening's calm and holy hour, As if its inmost depths discerned
The presence of a loftier power?
Hast thou not heard 'mid forest glades
While ancient rivers murmured by, A voice from forth the eternal shades,
That spake a present Deity ?
And as, upon the sacred page.
Thine eye in rapt attention turned O'er records of a holier age.
Hath not thy heart within thee burned?
' G. H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, 141.
ST. LUKE XXIV. 32 47Q
It was the voice of God, that spake
In silence to thy silent heart; And bade each worthier thought awake.
And every dream of earth depart.
Voice of our God, 0 yet be near !
In low, sweet accents, whisper peace ; Direct us on our pathway here ;
Then bid in heaven our wanderings cease. ^
6. Here we have the first recorded instance of emotions kindled in the human soul which since that hour have never ceased. It was the movement of the higher spirit in man, illuminated and quickened by the Eternal Spirit of our Lord Himself. We must not trust to all emotions ; they need to be tested by reason, to be confirmed by experience; they need to be examined as to their conformity to the will of God. But emotions, warm feelings in the soul, are a power, which, animating the soul, urging it onward, enable it to endure, and give it power to act. Intellectual conceptions are necessary, but they do not supply force of action, nor are they the kindling powers urging us on in the higher life. Even the conscientious sense of duty, noble gift as it is, grand as it is in its effects, has not the quicken- ing active power, the animating sustaining force of emotions stirred by the Spirit of God, moving the afi'ections. These in- spirations, these movings of the Spirit, these burnings of heart, were what the Greek Paganism, in the midst of which the Church grew up, had to reckon with. The Pagan Empire brought all its power, all its cruelty, all the strength of ages of dominion, to bear on these emotions, on these burnings of heart of the weakest and poorest, even of the child. And all failed. It was these emotions, these kindlings of heart, filled with the Spirit of God, that met the Koman Empire in its desire to extinguish the infant Church.
True religion cannot afford to neglect any elements of man's complex nature ; and so it finds room for emotion. That glow of the soul with which it should hail the Presence of its Maker and Kedeemer is as much His handiwork as the thinking power which apprehends His message or the resolve which enterprises to do
1 S. G. Bulfinch.
48o OPEN BIBLE AND BURNING HEART
His will. Yet religious emotion, like natural fire, is a good servant but a bad master. It is the ruin of real religion when it blazes up into a fanaticism which, in its exaltation of certain states of feeling, proscribes thought, and makes light of duty, and dispenses with means of grace, and passes through some phase of frantic, although disguised self-assertion into some further phase of indifference or despair. But, when kept well in hand, emotion is the warmth and lustre of the soul's life. It announces the nearness and the beauty of the King of Truth ; it lifts the per- formance of duty from the level of mechanical obedience to the level of ordered enthusiasm. Often, as in the souls of the two disciples, it is as the brightness of the dawn, which should tell that the Sun of Truth is near.
Lift up your eyes, even now His coming glows; Where on the skirt of yon heaven-kissing hill The trees stand motionless Upon the silvery dawn.
Deep ocean treasures all her gems unseen, To pave an archway to the Eternal door; And earth doth rear her flowers To strew the heavenly road.
^ " We have made great strides forward in every line of accomplishment except that of original, true, and emotional preaching," said the other, as if waking out of a reverie. "I agree," said his companion ; " but emotion in itself is not an art but a gift. The business of the artist is to direct emotion, tone it into a rhythm, and make it effective." ^